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5 social media tools to save time and boost efficiency

As we start a new year, it’s a great time to reflect on how we can improve our marketing efforts online. One area to consider is the emerging tools that can help us be more productive and efficient.

Your time is your most precious asset, and social media eats into it. Using the correct tools is only part of your social media strategy, but it’s an important part.

Here are five tools that can save you time and kick-start your business in 2013:

Convert Facebook fans to customers with Agorapulse

It’s easy to get caught up with the number of fans you have on Facebook, but we’re in the business of selling our products and services. Your time spent on Facebook needs to be rewarded.

If you’re on Facebook and you want to take it to the next level, invest in a Facebook marketing platform that will help.

Agorapulse is one such platform that contains a broad range of functionality, including page management, 14 applications, and the facility for building a profile of your fans to help turn them into leads and, ultimately, sales.

Here are three highlights of Agorapulse:

Fan profiling: As fans interact with your content and applications, Agorapulse records it and builds a profile. Having this profile enables you to segment your fans so you can target your offers.

Suite of applications: There are 14 useful applications for a broad range of functionality you can use to interact with your fans and further enhance build the fan profile.

Viral sharing: All apps support Facebook Open Graph. This means that more friends of your fans will see your content. When you’re using applications, getting access to friends of fans is where you will reap the benefits, and Agorapulse has the necessary functionality to do this effectively.

Be more social using Nimble

Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems are dated. More and more of our interaction is with current and potential customers through social media channels. It’s important to have a CRM system that reflects that.

Nimble is a social CRM tool that is tightly integrated with social media channels and helps you manage and grow relationships with your contacts, which can ultimately lead to sales.
What’s particularly nice about Nimble is how it builds up a profile of each user by retrieving their social details across a range of networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Would you like to see your contacts activity across all these social networks in one place and then have the ability to interact within Nimble? Yes, I thought you might.

Monitor your brand more effectively with Mention

Google Alerts is a well-known, free application that enables you to track mentions of keywords on the Web. It’s useful, but it’s not very comprehensive.

Mention is one of the best and most cost effective solutions I have come across. With a small team, the company has done amazingly well to deliver a Web-based app, an iPhone app, and a desktop app that you can use to monitor keywords relevant to your brand.

Here’s how it works: You set up filters based on keywords you want to track; Mention displays what it finds through a nice interface. By clicking on any item, you can see additional information related to the user and the item.

The following shows a filter based on my name that was mentioned on blogs. This identified an article on Mark Schaefer’s blog {grow} that was featured on a blog post from Aaron Lee, who is based in Asia.

Overall, Mention is a very powerful tool with a reasonable price.

Grow Pinterest with Pingraphy

Pinterest was one of the hottest social media sites last year; it’s destined to be even hotter in 2013. In case you missed 2012, Pinterest is a virtual pinboard, in which users share images they find online by “pinning” the items to their board (or boards). Other users can then view, comment, and share those items.

As you build your presence on Pinterest, you’ll need some tools that will help.

Pingraphy enables you to upload your pins (pictures you put on a board) in bulk, schedule these items and then view statistics related to how they progress.

If Pinterest is a growing platform for your business, check out Pingraphy.

Automate actions with IFTTT

IFTTT, the initials for If This Then That, is a useful tool for automating some tasks related to social media. If a particular event happens than another event is triggered.

Most tasks within social media cannot be automated, but there are some that make sense. For example, when you create a new blog post it makes sense to automatically share this on Twitter.

Within IFTTT you create a “recipe.” This recipe contains the source and the destination. When a trigger happens an action kicks off.

So for the recipe pictured below, the trigger is when a new post is published on the blog; the action is a tweet that includes the title of the post as well as a link.

There is a selection of recipes already built in that you can use or customize; you can also create your own recipe with a broad range of supported applications.

Are you using the right tools for your business? What are your tool tips for 2013?